Potential adverse effects of decarburization in terms of output and employment losses have made countries skeptical. Higher input costs associated with decarbonization or regulatory requirements is known as the cost effect (CE). We estimate these costs in terms of labor requirements. The CE is the ratio of efficient labor requirements for a regulatory technology to a non-regulatory technology. The cost effect is split into technical change, input-mix change, and output change effects. We compute the CE using both, the by-production (BP) and the weak-disposability (WD) approaches. We use industry-level data of inputs and outputs for the Indian economy from 2000 to 2014. We find that the CE is higher for the BP approach relative to the WD approach implying the costly disposability of both CO2 emissions and fossil fuels. We also observe that the technical change is labor-saving and the employment effect is equal for both the approaches.